“The Black Cat” – By Edgar Allan Poe

“The Black Cat” is a famous short story from horror – master Edgar Allan Poe. It was first printed on august 19, 1843, in the Philadelphia edition of a newspaper called the united states Saturday post.

Theme:

-          Performing evil deeds will lead to vengeance

-          Heavy use of alcohol may bring out the worst in a human being

-       The other theme of the story is that the story is no matter how hard you try to keep the truth hidden in the dark it will always come to the light.

Conflict:

The story is an internal conflict, Man vs. Self. And the conflict begins  to unfold when the man describes the way his personality changed for the worse when he started drinking heavily, several years after Pluto became his Pet.

Overall  story:

The beginning of the story starts out with the narrator in a jail cell the day before he is about to be hanged. He says that wants to let the reader know what events took place that got him into this predicament. The narrator says that he since the day he was born that he has been mild and kind and these qualities flourished as he got older. Marries a woman that shares his likeness for pets and they share a home with a plethora of pets. His favorite was a black cat named Pluto. The narrator starts drinking and his personality traits change to a hateful person. One night coming home drunk, he feels like the cat is ignoring him so he grabs it. The cat defends itself by biting his hand and only angered the narrator who took a pen knife and removed one of the cats eyes. A few days later, he is overcome by a perverse impulse and guilt and decides to hang the hang from a tree in the garden even though he knew it was wrong . the night of the hanging, his room caught on fire and he loses everything. The next day he returns and sees a cat with a rope around his neck on the one wall left standing of the house.

The figure on the wall disturbed the man. One night on his way home from the bar, he finds a black cat that looks like Pluto except he has a white patch on his chest. He brings the cat home to his wife who is pleased. The spot on the cats chest began to shift in the mans' mind and it began to look like the gallows. The narrator begins to despise the cat but is afraid to abuse it. The cat doesn't leave his side and often tries to lay on the narrators as he is trying to sleep. So he is not getting any sleep and his abuse towards his wife escalates. One day, the narrator and his wife go down into the cellar and the cat tries to trip the narrator. Out of anger, he tries to strike the cat with an ax that he is holding. The wife defends the cat. Out of impulse, he bury the axe into wife’s' head.

After much deliberation, the narrator decides to conceal the body in the wall in the cellar. The narrator is able to sleep soundly for the first time in months. Cops come around the house but don't find anything suspicious. The narrator has been looking for the cat and by the fourth day, the cops come back around and even went down into the cellar. Whenever he believes that he has gotten away with murder; he hits the wall where his wife is buried with his cane and a noise from the wall emerges. It sounds every and like a child screeching. The cops tear down the wall and find the wife’s' body with the cat on her head. The narrator buried the cat in there with her and gave away to his crime. This is why he is in jail and is sentenced to death by hanging.